For whoever said NPCs always look the same, that's true, but at least they were spread out. I see the same NPCs at least three times in that first piccy o_o It's a bit redundant; I'm sure they could've been more creative this time around, since their repetitive NPCs are boring.
I also hope the screenies on Serebii are deterioriated quality-wise. If the game's quality isn't drastically better, I'm disappointed there, too. At the moment, it looks choppy and pixely. Again, pretty sure it's going to look better, but it looks raunchy for now.
Kanto and Johto had the same feel for me. Hoenn brought up a lot of technology in one platter which further advanced into D/P/Pt. I never finished Hoenn or Sinnoh games because of various reasons, but one being that they didn't feel like they should. Nothing attached me. The fact they urbanized it so much made it too similar to the real world. I play Pokemon games for how fantastical it is and how non-realistic they are. Pokemon are simply animals, and up until Hoenn, they lived in a world similar to the 1900s without depression and with a few obligatory technical aspects, like electricity, instant-heal centres, etc. There weren't cars, tall buildings, or over-crowded streets, though. That's more like today's world. If I want to experience that, I'll just go outside - without my DS.
It's just too realistic now. Pokemon and fantasy games are attaching to a lot of people because of how non-realistic and how anti-urban they are... in the case of Pokemon, were. To suddenly connect it so suddenly to the real world made it lose its charm of being fiction. Now it's just animals used to make money and become famous in an overly-urbanized, similar-to-the-real-world region. Is that not like real-day rooster fights? Same concept; one's pit against the other for cash in an underground place. The Team Rocket of society lol
Dunno. Basically, I don't like how realistic it's become. It killed the charm Pokemon had for me.
If Zelda suddenly became overly-urbanized and technology became wide-spread, I wouldn't play it either. Zelda's charm is being medieval. Repetitive as it may become, they always add something to the new games to keep it new, fresh, and entertaining. I'm sure Pokemon could have done the same. They just killed it for me lol